2021 G5 Preview: Georgia Southern Is Perpetually A Quarterback Away From Awesome
Let's talk about the Sun Belt's original triple team
ICYMI: This is a part of The Outside Zone’s full 2021 G5 preview series, which last looked at Troy. You can find a master list for all of the previews here.
There’s something special about Georgia Southern football. I’m far from the first to say it, and even further from being qualified to dive fully into the details of it. I’ve never been to Statesboro, never seen a game at Allen E. Paulson Stadium. In all honesty, I wasn’t even really aware of Georgia Southern until it made the jump to the Sun Belt, and even then, my first real exposure to it was in 2019, when I traveled to Boone, N.C. with my dad to watch the Eagles bludgeon their rivals in the worst weather I’ve ever experienced.
That’s how you know it’s special. Anyone that engages with this program for any period of time, be it through attending a game, watching on TV or even just reading about it knows right away that there’s just something there. I’m not even sure what that something is, just that it exists and that it’s impossible to talk about Georgia Southern football without using the kind of flowery language reserved usually for Sports Illustrated baseball writers, back when that meant something. How could you not be romantic about Georgia Southern football?
Though this is a wild oversimplification, a lot of it goes back to Erk Russell, who literally built the program. The long-time Georgia defensive coordinator was tasked with leading Georgia Southern’s brand new football program back in 1982. Three years later, he won his first title, toppling Furman in the 1985 FCS National Championship, 44-42. He would claim another in 1986, and earned his third and final title in 1989, capping a perfect 15-0 season with a win over Stephen F. Austin. Russell, who was 63 at the time if Wikipedia is to be believed, retired after the game.
Though his time at Georgia Southern was – in the grand scheme of things – fairly short, Russell’s impact is almost impossible to accurately quantify. Every single part of this program, every tradition, every quirk, it all goes back to him. Even the uniforms – some of college football’s simplest – were a Russell creation. When he took over, Georgia Southern was so strapped for cash and had to save money anywhere it could, so the Eagles used their plain white practice pants in games and added flair to their uniforms with a single strip of white tape down the middle of their navy blue helmets. They took yellow school buses loaned to them by a local high school to travel to games.
He told his players that a drainage ditch near the field was “Beautiful Eagle Creek” because he felt that his program needed a tradition. His “Get After Their Asses (or GATA)” slogan can be seen all over Paulson Stadium, and even adorns the higher-tech, modern helmet bumpers. Decades removed, all of this remains intact. Georgia Southern still rocks delightfully basic uniforms, rides the yellow buses to games and walks over the awful little creek.
Most importantly, Georgia Southern still runs the triple option – or, better put, a modern version of it. Russell ran the triple for the same reason he did everything else that he did in Statesboro – because it was the only thing he could possibly do to win football games. Georgia Southern lacked the talent needed to compete in a more standard system, so it decided to win by running the option as well as it possibly could, because no one can consistently stop a perfectly executed option. You can coach perfect execution a whole lot easier than you can coach your players into being bigger, faster and better at football.
So, that’s what Southern did. For years. Russell ran it alongside offensive coordinators Paul Johnson and Stowers, Stowers ran it when he became the head coach in 1990, Johnson ran it when he took over in 1997. Johnson passed the baton to his OC, Mike Sewak, in 2002. It worked consistently, because Georgia Southern runs the triple option. That’s just a natural fact.
But as things started to crumble a bit with the copy of a copy of a copy. Sewak couldn’t win in the postseason, and broke with Russell when he fired his son in 2004. Sewak lasted through 2005, but was let go shortly after the season and replaced by Brian VanGorder.
VanGorder wasn’t in the Georgia Southern family, by design. The program decided that it needed a new face instead of a Russell disciple, and hired another Georgia defensive coordinator to lead the new look Eagles. VanGorder did away with the traditions in an attempt to improve Georgia Southern’s recruiting, starting with the triple option. He moved Georgia Southern to a more traditional system, thinking that he could sell the program as an established winner moving into a new era.
Obviously, it didn’t work. You can’t win if you don’t run the triple at Georia Southern. I don’t have a reason for this and I’m not going to search for one. I like to think that Russell haunts any coach that strays from the program’s humble roots, because he died in Statesboro in 2006 and his funeral was held in the stadium. Honestly, given how stubborn and willful the man was, there’s a decent chance that the haunting theory is true.
Regardless, after another fairly new-age coach in Chris Hatcher failed, Georgia Southern came to its senses and hired Jeff Monken, a former Johnson assistant, and more importantly, an option guy. The Eagles immediately started to win again, advancing three times to the FCS semifinals before Monken departed after 2013. Willie Fritz, a proven winner at Sam Houston State and one of the nation’s most committed run-first coaches replaced him and kept up the good times before he left for Tulane.
I promise I’ll end this extremely long introduction soon. Georgia Southern went next to Tyson Summers, a VanGorder guy that, stunningly, immediately ate shit because he didn’t run the option. Weird!
That brings us to the current man in charge, Chad Lunsford, a product of the Sewak, Monken and Fritz trees that ran the goddamn option and immediately started winning again because of it. Lunsford’s tenure has been, admittedly, a bit shakier than Georgia Southern would probably like (10-3 in year one, 7-6 in year two, 8-5 in year three), but he’s embracing the program’s extremely bizarre culture, and he’s running the objectively correct offense.
He’s also a good quarterback away from throwing a big fucking wrench into the Sun Belt East.
The Defense
I’m starting with the defense, because I have very little to say about it, and want to get it out of the way. Georgia Southern’s defense was good last season, and will likely remain good this season, though it will probably take a step back against the run because it loses defensive end Raymond Johnson III and two of its best linebackers. A super aggressive secondary returns, though, and coordinator Scot Sloan has only seen improvement since committing the ultimate sin and jumping from Appalachian State to Georgia Southern in 2018.
The Offense
Okay, here’s the good stuff. Georgia Southern isn’t running the triple from under center anymore, but it is still definitively a triple option team, and a very good one at that when it has a quarterback comfortable in the system.
The issue with that: It no longer has that, at least not in a way that we can prove entering the season. Longtime starter Shai Werts transferred to Louisiville this offseason to play receiver in his final season in hopes of getting an NFL nod, leaving Georgia Southern with a pair of inexperienced returners and Georgia Tech transfer James Graham (a Johnson recruit) to battle for the job.
That battle will likely pit one of those returning quarterbacks, Justin Tomlin, against Graham. There are a few other guys on the roster that could vie for it, including redshirt freshman Sam Kenerson, but he played just two games last season, and I’m not sure that he really brings anything that the two above him don’t already have – aside from some absolutely blazing speed.
If Graham is around, I think he’s probably the guy. However, he missed spring camp, and the reasoning sounds… not great.
“James is dealing with some personal issues and we’re helping him work through that,” Lunsford said. “You know, right now that’s just kind of up in the air.”
Because of that, we’ll pencil in Tomlin as the likely starter right now. I think that’s fine. He was not a comfortable passer last season and is unlikely to ever be especially strong in that part of the game, but he’s a good athlete and seems to have a pretty good feel for the option reads he’s expected to make. With a full offseason of No. 1 QB reps, I think he can get to where he needs to be, even if he’s not on the level of Werts yet. It takes time to become a proficient option quarterback.
Tomlin, or whoever gets the nod at quarterback, will be asked to operate a very well designed option offense. Georgia Southern has a few staples, but we’ll start with the simple stuff. The base look here is a pretty standard zone read, usually with an h-back slicing across the line and popping outside of the unblocked defensive end to serve as a lead blocker if that end bites on the handoff and forces a quarterback keeper.
They’ll use a second halfback as that lead blocker as well on designed quarterback keepers that look like zone read, though that’s a bit less frequent and doesn’t require the same attentiveness from the quarterback.
Next, we have the speed option, which the Eagles actually seem to use more frequently than the zone read. This is almost always done from two-back looks like this one, with the playside back taking on the first second- or third-level defender that moves into his field of vision beyond the h-backs first block, while the quarterback is reading the edge setting defender. If he hedges to the outside onto the backside halfback, the quarterback just tucks the ball and takes it himself. If that defender is more aggressive, it’s a simple pitch out to that halfback. It’s speed option. You’ve all played the NCAA Football video games.
Now, Georgia Southern has a few variations on this that I really like, none moreso than the gap blocking, counter version. This is almost equally simple, but the Eagles use a very slight wrinkle to completely fuck with the linebackers and to get a stronger lead blocker out there in the form of a pulling guard. The reads are the same, the general design is the same, but the inside block that would usually go to an h-back goes now to the pulling guard. Georgia Southern sets this up with counter footwork in the backfield, as the quarterback opens first to the backside, freezing the linebackers and providing time for that guard to get to his spot, because guards take longer than h-backs.
This is something that Coastal Caroina does really well too. You can freeze a defense really easily, without even dedicating a player to the sell, if your quarterback is convincing in his fakes.
Werts really, really was, and it opened up huge lanes for this offense. Tomlin isn’t on that level yet, but that’s what the offseason is for in this kind of system. He’ll get better at it every single week.
Lastly, we have the actual, honest-to-God triple. Georgia Southern runs this from so many formations and with so many different kinds of motion that I just don’t have the time to get into, so I’ll just need you to trust me on this. The core ideology is the same in all of those looks. They all work, roughly, like this. The first read is the inside zone handoff, with the quarterback making his isolated defensive end read in the same way that he would on zone read. That slicing h-back remains, getting outside of the unblocked end and looking to lead the way for whoever gets the ball if this goes to its second read, which is that standard speed option.
It’s just a combination of the two base concepts. Again, you’ve all played NCAA, you know what this is.
Here it is with the h-back in the backfield. It’s the same idea. This rushing attack has three core plays that it runs from a billion formations, because that’s what you do when you run the spread option. The danger of the offense comes from the fact that even though the defense knows what’s coming, it never knows where it’s coming from. You can’t overload the read side of the field if you don’t know which side of the field the offense is reading.
The passing attack isn’t really worth talking about, but I’ll mention it purely so that I can again say that every team in America should have this absolutely nasty split zone dummy in its playbook. If your quarterback is even somewhat convincing, it’s getting you a first down nine times out of ten.
Georgia Southern will be good again this season, because it’s good every single year that it runs the triple. As Steven Godfrey so artfully put it back in 2015, the tradition that rules them all in Statesboro is winning. Even with a difficult schedule and a new quarterback, the Eagles will be bowl bound as long as they run the damn ball. Their ceiling beyond that this season comes down to how good that new quarterback is, and how much more Sloan can do with this defense.
I don’t think that Georgia Southern can outpace Coastal Carolina, Louisiana or App State in wins this season, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be the former two, which have to travel to Statesboro, and it’s hard to imagine a rivalry named “deeper than hate” yielding anything but an absolute banger, regardless of how much more talented the Mountaineers are.
Georgia Southern is going to get after the asses of every team it plays this season. Just like Erk drew it up.